Review: Novels by Alexandra Kleeman, Edward St. Aubyn and More

You Too Can Have a Body Like MineBy Alexandra Kleeman283 pages. Harper. $25.99.

This frequently impressive debut has some of George Saunders’s loony satire and some of Don DeLillo’s bone-deep paranoia. The young woman who narrates it, referred to only as A, is assailed from without by the culture’s dominant ideas about appetite and beauty, and from within by her own neuroses. She lives with a creepily clingy roommate called B, and dates a man named C, who is “great at watching TV,” someone who “could go for hours and never get that dead look in the face.” The high-water mark is a series of commercials for Kandy Kakes, a treat that is seemingly toxic (like “eating a gasoline rainbow, if gasoline tasted good”) but irresistible. The ads, starring a desperate character named Kandy Kat whose craving for the dessert is foiled in increasingly inventive ways, are brilliantly demented. The symbols of modern anomie in this novel are familiar (soulless supermarkets, insane mass entertainments, etc.), but Ms. Kleeman has a singular, off-kilter style, and a distinct vision of the absurd horrors that can come with being trapped in a body. Only in its last third, when consumer society’s subtexts become too literal, does the book lose some of its mysterious potency.

A Clue to the ExitBy Edward St. Aubyn185 pages. Picador. $16.

Charlie is a screenwriter whose doctor has given him six months to live. (“If I die one day sooner he’ll be hearing from my lawyers.”) He takes the verdict as a sign that he should bear down and write a more serious work: a novel about consciousness, a grand subject that is mysterious and therefore “a fertile field for fiction, unlike the steam engine, for instance, which is relatively well understood.” Intent on losing his money in a casino, Charlie ends up multiplying it. Wanting to drown at sea, he is rescued. Failing does not come easy to him. We see extended passages from the novel in progress, which is less pithy than Charlie’s thoughts. “A Clue to the Exit,” first published in Britain 15 years ago, arrives here after the conclusion of Mr. St. Aubyn’s celebrated quintet of novels featuring an autobiographical character named Patrick Melrose. It doesn’t have the cohesive power or the sustained heights of those books, but any excuse will do to spend some time with this author’s wicked humor and his sentences, some of the best in the language.

The Story of My TeethBy Valeria LuiselliTranslated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeneyIllustrated. 195 pages. Coffee House Press. $16.95.

The narrator of Valeria Luiselli’s new novel establishes the book’s tone in the opening sentences: “I’m the best auctioneer in the world, but no one knows it because I’m a discreet sort of man. My name is Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez, though people call me Highway, I believe with affection.” Highway collects the teeth of famous people (he claims), at one point even installing Marilyn Monroe’s in his own mouth. Such details make it clear that Ms. Luiselli follows in the imaginative tradition of writers like Borges and Márquez, but her style and concerns are unmistakably her own. This deeply playful novel is about the passion and obsession of collecting, the nature of storytelling, the value of objects, and the complicated bonds of family. (At one point, Highway auctions himself off. His estranged son buys him.) Still in her early 30s, Ms. Luiselli has become a writer to watch, in part because it’s truly hard to know (but exciting to wonder about) where she will go next.

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The Things We Don’t DoBy Andrés NeumanTranslated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia190 pages. Open Letter. $13.95.

This collection packs a lot of nutrition into bite-size stories, several of which are just a couple of pages. In “Delivery,” told in one deliriously long and winding sentence, a man gives birth. In “Juan, José,” a patient in therapy believes he’s the one conducting the analysis. In “Clothes,” a man arrives to work naked each day, and his stunned colleagues slowly start to follow suit. Most of these stories have a light touch, even when they deal with tense or dreadful subjects: lovers’ quarrels, betrayal, even suicide. The book closes with a few “reflections on short-form narrative” that “arose during the writing process.” One such reflection: “To narrate is to seduce: never completely satisfy the reader’s curiosity.” Mr. Neuman accomplishes that seduction here, leaving readers wanting more.

Undermajordomo MinorBy Patrick deWitt317 pages. Ecco. $26.99.

Fairly or not, it’s easiest to describe Patrick deWitt, so far, as a novelist who riffs on things. Thrillingly so. His previous novel, “The Sisters Brothers,” bent the western into new shapes. His new one is a meandering but often entertaining fairy tale, in which a hapless man called Lucy Minor goes to work for the major-domo of a castle. Geography and era are purposely abstracted. Where we are, when we are, or why we’re there are all afterthoughts. What matters is Mr. deWitt’s imagination, which is a forceful train that ignores the usual tracks. The book contains an unexplained war, love gained and lost, a baron gnawing on a rat for nourishment, and a very large hole called the Very Large Hole. Characters deadpan lines like: “One doesn’t have to smell like a salami if one doesn’t wish it.” A fairy tale this may be, but it’s decidedly for adults, never more than during a crowded scene that makes disturbing use of a dessert tart and a candle.

In her latest, Lily Tuck, who won the National Book Award in 2004 for her novel “The News From Paraguay,” blends fact and fiction in unknowable proportions to create a collage of autobiography and globe-trotting history. Whether Ms. Tuck’s father was really an acquaintance of Josephine Baker — to name just one detail — is less important than the book’s generations-spanning view of ordinary lives being acted out against the backdrop of the world wars and beyond. Dotted with photographs, some more obscure than others, the novel aims for a Sebaldian effect. Ms. Tuck’s writing is never less than agile, but “The Double Life of Liliane” remains somewhat flat and lacks cumulative power. The third-person approach sacrifices the meaning-making that could have turned these elegant but somewhat icy fragments into a more satisfying whole.

A version of this review appears in print on September 24, 2015, on Page C6 of the New York edition with the headline: Newly Released. Today's Paper|Subscribe